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Even for a stubborn skeptical person such as me it is sometimes hard to deny a certain super-natural tendency in the way things play out. Due to holidays, and the good old ‘huh-is-it-my-turn-again’, we almost didn’t have a Caromble! Friday #404. Page not found… But of course it could also just be that our brains are so hard-wired to find patterns, and perhaps even patterns that don’t exist. My inner skeptic just won’t let me write a paragraph like this without that disclaimer…

Anyway, with the holidays and all, we can perhaps be forgiven for having a bit of a slow week. Weeks do get slow Caromble!-wise easily being part-time developers and all. It just takes a single day of being a bit under the weather, and boom no productivity for a week. Especially in the Holiday season that means that things can get slow quickly.

So what did happen… Well we made some progress in our effort to tell the back story of the game. We got a new version of the storyboard, and are working with that.

Personally I did some work on the planning towards the final release. Deciding on what will fit in the scope of the game is a continuous and difficult process.

As a gamer (which we of course also are) you never know what features, ideas, extra levels and effects didn’t make the cut. You either like or dislike a game. Of course you might have feelings like, ‘this game would be even better with multiplayer’, or great level ideas. But that is not the same as missing a feature. You will definitely notice when a game feels ‘off’ or when it simply isn’t fun. Or when it feels rough and unfinished of course. But when it feels good, but could have been even beter… You just will never know.

As a developer, your game is never finished. There is always one more level to make. Every effect can be made even nice. The balance of the game could always be tweaked a liiitle bit tighter. There might always be another FPS to be gained on a particular system.

So I guess you will always feel like you are releasing something that is in some abstract way unfinished. The witness feels like a perfectly polished game, but who knows how many things Jonathan Blow cut out that we’ll never hear of?

So that is our devil’s dilemma. We want to made a great game. We have been going at it for like 8 or 9 years. But we also want to release it. We have made estimates in the past and gloriously missed them, because there was always something more to add. So I guess it is time to end this cycle and finally decide on when will be done.